Session 3

Between 1838 and 1917, hundreds of thousands of Indians were brought to the Caribbean to work as indentured laborers on British plantation. For many Indo-Guyanese musicians today, the past is a reminder of indenture’s traumas or an embarrassing site of rural stereotypes. For others, indenture signifies heritage and pride in hard work. How does one construct shared identities of the indenture diaspora when the past is so fraught?

Anna Schultz is an ethnomusicologist whose research in India and beyond addresses music’s power to activate profound religious experiences that in turn shape other identities. Her first book, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, and her second book, Songs of Translation: Bene Israel Gender and Textual Orality, is under contract with Oxford University Press. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Music.

Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian examining radical thought and the recovery of the classics in early modern Europe, especially in the Italian Renaissance. She focuses on the history of science, religion, heresy, free thought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and on patronage and the networks of power and money that enabled cultural creation in early modern Europe. She has written Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2014) and the award-winning science fiction novel series Terra Ignota (beginning with Too Like the Lightning).

William Pope.L is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries, and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create artworks in various formats, for example, writing, painting, performance, installation, video, and sculpture. The goals for his work are several—joy, money and uncertainty—not necessarily in that order.

Guided tour of Censorship and Information Control, Anquity to the Internet: Why do people censor? For ambition? Religion? Profit? Power? Fear? This global history of attempts to control or silence information, from antiquity's earliest written records to our new digital world, examines how censorship has worked, thrived, or failed in different times and places. It examines how real censorship movements tend to be very different from the centralized, methodical censorship depicted in Orwell's 1984, which so dominates how we imagine censorship today.

Venice is Italy's honeymoon city, a lushly romantic floating dream of gently gliding gondolas and quaint traffic-free streets and squares through which to meander. Some writers and film directors, however, have captured another dark, dangerous, and even positively macabre Venice.

In the late-Antebellum South, a new genre of free black life-writing emerged: the self-enslavement petition. From the southern state legislatures that passed laws enabling such petitions, through the local judicial functionaries who ruled on them, to the abolitionist writers who had to manage their (sporadic) reality, free black petitions for enslavement engendered a philosophical and cultural scandal.

From 1681 until the early 19th century, if you went to the theater to see King Lear, you would have seen the version adapted by Nahum Tate from Shakespeare's original. With its happy ending, Tate's play is often mocked as a terrible travesty of Shakespeare's. This lecture will show that Tate's play is first quite a brilliant reading of Shakespeare's, and second that knowing Tate's play makes us better readers of Shakespeare's.

Amber Ginsburg and William Pope.L, from the Department of Visual Arts, will discuss their work in the context of climate change and the global war on terror. This talk will question the role of poetics in our current political climate.

Join UChicago Arts for a conversation between Virginio Ferrari and Andrei Pop on the lifespan of public art, from conception to fruition to evolution. Together, they will discuss the following questions: How does the artist create a sculpture to respond to a specific architectural or geographical context? How does the work survive changes in its surroundings (architectural, geographical, political) after it has been installed? How does the context of the piece evolve through those changes? The conversation will be introduced and moderated by artist and entrepreneur John Kuhns (MFA ’75).